We carry around our backpack full of stuff with us everywhere we go. If you never turn inward and look at your stuff and give it a chance to process and release, you never unload anything from your backpack. Your stuff just keeps piling up and the load you are carrying gets heavier and heavier.

Find stillness and concentrate. Let the fire build. Let the mind turn inward. Sit in the fire and look at your stuff. Let it come up. Breathe into it and then breathe it out. Let it process. Let it release. This is the work on your mat. The more stuff you are holding onto…the more stuff you have pushed down…the more stuff you are carrying around in your backpack -- the longer it will take for you to dig yourself out and to UNLOAD YOUR STUFF.

If your mind is always scattered, always running all over the place, and always fidgeting, then you never get the chance to look inside, and you never get the chance to unload anything. The load you are carrying just gets heavier and heavier. YOU just get heavier and heavier, as more and more stuff piles up.

Someone hurts you and you feel pain. This pain gets expressed through feelings like anger, betrayal and sadness. Once the emotions process and release, the pain is gone. This is a healthy process. We run into problems when we don’t allow ourselves to feel our feelings and instead we push them down. We make a decision to hold onto them and deal with them later, or simply to hold onto them without any intention of ever letting them go. We put our feelings, our STUFF, into our BACKPACK, our subconscious mind, and our stuff just piles up.

If you keep putting things into your backpack eventually some stuff is going to fall out. Your backpack gets overloaded and stuff that you’ve pushed down starts to come up, whether you like it or not. When this happens, this can create a lot of problems. Especially if you don’t understand the process of how energy is moving through you, how your emotions are helping you to release tension from your subconscious mind.

Having a consistent yoga practice will help you to sharpen your mind and better discern what is happening when emotions are coming up for you. Are you having a healthy emotional reaction to the present moment? Or, is the emotion that is coming up just, old, stuck energy moving through you? If you’re in a chair pose and you start to feel angry and frustrated, you’re not really angry at the chair pose, or the person next to you, or the teacher in the class, or the music that is playing, or the temperature in the room. Remember, your subconscious tension has nothing to do with the present moment.

Have you ever witnessed someone reacting completely out of proportion in a situation? We’ve all had our moments. How about driving on the freeway, in heavy traffic, when you have somewhere to go? Road rage is a classic example of the mind confusing subconscious mental tension with what is actually happening in the present moment. Does it make sense that you would get angry, scream and yell and maybe even physically attack someone for a minor traffic infraction? Or, does it make more sense that in that moment of anger, or sadness, fear, or frustration there is subconscious tension that needed to release and it suddenly came flooding to the surface? The people around you now have to suffer as you use them to process your emotions and unload your stuff, in an unhealthy way, completely disconnected from the present moment.

If you are constantly bottling up your emotions and not feeling your feelings, then your stuff is going to pile up. It will take a long time and a lot of practice for you to release all of your stuff but you need to start this process now and start to unload your backpack. It’s not going to get any easier the longer you wait. The stuff you are carrying around is making it harder for you as you move through your life, harder for you to connect with other people, to be in the present moment and ultimately to connect with your higher self and the Universe. Start the process of working out your stuff as quickly as you can. You need to go through this process and get to the other side and stop putting more stuff into your backpack.

Get on your mat and develop a consistent yoga and meditation practice.

Find stillness and concentrate. Let the fire build. Let the mind turn inward. Sit in the fire and look at your stuff. Let it come up. Breathe into it and then breathe it out. Let it process. Let it release. This is the work on your mat.

Things start to get really interesting in your meditation practice once you clear out all of your stuff. When you dig yourself out you start to tap into creative inspiration, Universal love and your higher Self. Your intuition becomes stronger, you start to gain insight into your true purpose and your intuitive voice, previously obscured by all of the noise in your head, begins to grow louder. You start to see things more clearly. You start to move through life with less suffering. Great ideas start to move through you. You experience a sense of oneness and connectedness with the entire Universe and an overwhelming sense of compassion and kindness for all living beings. You are able to move through the world with greater ease, more awareness, and more connection to the present moment. This is the yogic shift. You become an instrument of change, a beacon of light in the world.

When you clear out some space in your mind you start to see where you are supposed to go, what you are supposed to do, and who you are supposed to be. You get to live the life you were always meant to live.